WOM Beta Becomes WOM 365

It’s a new year and it’s time for some changes! WOM Beta is finally going out of Beta; it’s becoming WOM 365.

And yes, this is in association with another important change: Size Acceptance 365!

Size Acceptance 365, or SA365 for short, is quite literally about creatively expressing the need and value in improving your own quality of life from day to day, and becoming an example to others concerning size (weight or height) acceptance. SA365 embraces the concept of health at every size, including fitness and making healthy food choices.

The very nature of size acceptance means to reach beyond the numbers on a scale or a shirt or dress size, to find ways to be healthy without embracing failed methods such as weight loss dieting, drugs or surgery. SA365 does not exclude those who have dieted, lost weight or undergone procedures such as surgery but it does not endorse those methods. SA365 starts today and looks forward to the future.

While SA365 is a concept created by myself, Allen Steadham, the Founder and Director of the International Size Acceptance Association, it is not ISAA-exclusive. ISAA is not sponsoring SA365, only participating and hosting this webpage.

SA365 is open to all people, organizations and groups. It is not limited to the size acceptance movement or size activists. SA365 does not exclude anyone unless their planned activity or participation is either illegal or blatantly against size acceptance (such as feederism or dieting/weight loss).

Here are ways to participate in SA365:

1. Link to the SA365 webpage – http://www.sa365.info – with the SA365 banner image below:

2. We’re on Facebook! Click on the link below and then we hope you click LIKE on our Facebook page and tune in for updates or join in discussions and/or related activities:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Size-Acceptance-365/185932598099683

3. Create your own event, webpage, blog or idea and then let us know about it! You can contact us through the SA365 email address: size.acceptance365@gmail.com

From The Director’s Chair…

On July 1st, ISAA will be 13 years old. That means our organization will officially be a teenager, which is certainly appropriate, because we also relate to the BBTeenz. We’d like to continue to reach out to the `Teenz and we want to hear from them, too! The next PODWOM (Podcast Without Measure) will have a BBTeenz theme.

Now, believe it or not, PODWOM is already five years old! And we’re making plans to expand (pun intended) and become international, just like ISAA. In the coming weeks and months, you can look forward to PODWOM UK, which will be hosted by ISAA UK’s Fatima Parker. Fatima’s been very busy, as always. Not only does she continue to run the United Kingdom and Middle East/North Africa (MENA) branches of ISAA, but it’s now my pleasure to announce her promotion to ISAA’s Vice President of Activism (both U.S. and International). We’re all volunteers here at ISAA, so we really appreciate Fatima’s dedication, determination, courage and professionalism that she has demonstrated since becoming a part of ISAA in 2001.

In other news, ISAA would like to ask for some volunteers, specifically ones who are knowledgeable concerning healthy food choices and fitness at any size. ISAA’s primary motto is “Respect, Fitness, Health.” We do pretty good at getting the word out about Respect, including educating about self-esteem and advocacy for the rights of people of all sizes and combating weight-based discrimination. But that’s only a fraction of what ISAA supports. We’d love to do so much more, but there’s only a few people presently able to provide information for the ISAA website, so we’ll admit it — we need your help.

We would like to open up a section that recommends safe fitness routines, varying from low- to medium-impact — which could help people become more active without compromising their health or their dignity. Unfortunately, for many people of size, going to the gym means enduring insults or being stigmatized. However, if the same people had an option either within their own home or nearby, the possibilities become dramatically greater.

We’d also like to create a section with guidelines for making healthy food choices. And we’d love to introduce healthy recipes for delicious foods which aren’t designed for weight loss; they’d be designed to taste great and make you feel great (because it’s healthy). We know most of our readers are on a budget of some kind (we are, too!), so we’d like to prove that healthy and tasty food doesn’t have to be expensive. We’d also like to offer vegetarian/vegan, dairy-free or gluten-free varieties to our “menu.” That said, we know this will take some time, but it w ill certainly be worth it.

So, if you’re fired up about fitness for all sizes or a foodie (or even nutritionist) with super recipes and a zest for cooking, contact ISAA at isaafitness@gmail.com or isaafoodie@gmail.com and put either FITNESS or FOOD in the subject line, depending on what your specialty is.

But we’re not quite finished yet! Keeping in mind that Without Measure (WOM) started out as ISAA’s printed newsletter, then morphed into an e-zine and now, as you see (since you’re here), WOMBeta is ISAA’s group blog. However, we’re looking for some new writers. We’re inviting anyone to write blog entries on a virtually unlimited variety of size- or weight-related topics. Your blog entries will be subject to WOM’s submissions guidelines but really, those are fairly lenient.

The bottom line is, we know you’ve got a lot to say and WOM wants to be your sounding board! Email your blog entries to womeasure@gmail.com with the subject line “WOMBeta.”

That’s it for this “From The Director’s Chair.” Have a wonderful day!

Allen Steadham, Director
International Size Acceptance Association
Email: directisaa@gmail.com

PETA Retreats, Removes Anti-Fat Ads

From ISAA Director Allen Steadham

08.28.09 – The People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has seen reason and removed the offensive “Save The Whales! Lose The Blubber. Go Vegetarian” billboard ads and replaced them with the ironic but considerably less offensive “Gone – Just like all the pounds lost by people who go vegetarian.”

“Gone” — as if to say to you, the public “Gone! We get it. We heard you loud and clear! We removed our ‘offensive’ ad and came up with something milder, okay?” And that’s fine. That’s all we were asking for.

This clearly shows once again that all it takes is a concentrated effort sending a simple yet very loud message to those who discriminate. With enough time and all the resources available (telephone, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, webpages, faxes and postal mail), the offending party will get the message and if they do not wish to continue to be flooded with angry (yet peaceful) protest, which can also lead to boycotts of them financially, then they will change course and correct the problem. This works for politicians, corporations and anti-fat organizations like PETA.

Thank you ALL for your participation in this activism/advocacy effort. It may seem like something small — but in this case, within two weeks’ time, you got PETA to replace billboard ads all across the United States! And those ads were berating and hurting fat people every time they saw them, sometimes multiple times in a day. So it’s a big deal! Give yourselves a hand, you deserve it!

PETA Attacks Fat People — Again!

PETA billboard ad

From ISAA Director Allen Steadham:

I received the following email yesterday from a citizen who observed a new billboard ad campaign  called Save The Whales from the People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), so I checked out their website and sure enough, there it was, listed as a Billboard campaign! Here’s the email (the individual’s name is being withheld for privacy reasons):

I would like to express my OUTRAGE of a Billboard I recently saw in Jacksonville, Florida. My family was visiting and i was planning on taking them to the beach to enjoy the beautiful day when i saw the billboard that made me want to cry. It says “Save the Whales” with a picture of an over weight woman in the foreground.

We all sat there and stared at it for a minute and everyone in the car was silent. No one wanted to mention my weight. I laughed it off as usual but it really had made me so embarrassed, so self conscious and so ashamed about my weight that I dropped off my family at the ocean front and left to go home making the excuse that I wasn’t feeling well.

My embarrassment turned to outrage as I was sitting at home contemplating the distasteful, disgusting billboard. I can’t believe that PETA would be so disrespectful as to use the terms “Whales” and “Blubber” when referring to obese people.

I wish there was something I could do. I’ve already written to them expressing my outrage of their malicious terms and asked them to take it down. PLEASE PLEASE DO SOMETHING! An organization such as PETA, who is in the news all the time, should not be allowed to get away with this!

I agree with this citizen and therefore, on behalf of ISAA, I am asking your help. We’ve taken on PETA before and we’ve made them change. Let’s do it again!

Please contact PETA (information below) and tell them to discontinue their Save The Whales ad campaign or we can exercise our right to boycott PETA and their sponsors.

Contact PETA:
Phone: 757-622-PETA (7382)
Fax: 757-622-0457
Leave comments on their Facebook page
Leave comments on their My Space page
Snail mail: 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510

What Will It Take?

We have begun to get glimpses at the U.S. Government-proposed “public option” in health care, and it is worse than I feared. And now ISAA is getting media requests to discuss the proposed “obesity taxes” associated with the same healthcare measures. The possibilities of the potential future are frightening.

Of course, we should be used to being made afraid. The medical and bariatric surgery industries try to make us afraid of fat, the U.S. Government tries to make us afraid of fat and just about any public figure who wants to stir up fear uses the Universal Term of Horror (UToH): Obesity. And it works.

Well now it’s our turn, except we’re not saying to be afraid of obesity. We’re saying fear those who would legislate obesity!

Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius says “We are killing ourselves, and more importantly, we are killing our children” at a 3-day conference in Washington D.C. called “Weight of the Nation.”  Wow, guys, how subtle.  At the same time, a “new study” came out claiming “obese Americans — those who are 30 or more pounds over a healthy weight — cost the country an estimated $147 billion in weight-related medical bills in 2008.” (Source: USA Today)

Was that study made by the same people who said 200,000 people die of obesity each year and it really turned out to be closer to 28,000 or less? Regardless, people in the medical industry and more importantly, people in the legislative and executive branches take these studies-passed-off-as-facts very seriously! And these are the people who will determine whether or not the healthcare initiative gets passed and if so, what will become law.

Now, in all fairness, Sibelius and others did make recommendations for encouraging healthy food choices and more physical activities on the local level. There’s nothing wrong with that, so long as that doesn’t translate into forcing people to eat specific things in specific quantities based on their Body Mass Index (BMI) or weight on a scale. Because we have another name for that: a DIET! And even the weight loss industry finally conceded that diets don’t work (just ask Weight Watchers, it’s their mantra now).

It doesn’t matter what those of us in the Size Acceptance Movement have been saying for years — that you can be fat and fit, that it takes a healthy self-esteem to make for a better person, that weight-based discrimination leads to eating disordered and other self-destructive behaviors (including suicide),  that the medical industry has a built-in bias against fat people that begins in medical school, that weight loss surgery kills thousands and maims thousands more each year. None of that matters! The law of the land is not ours to dictate…that is in the hands of elected officials in Washington D.C. who have their own opinions, their own biases and unfortunately, their own agendas.

A few weeks ago, I literally sounded the alarm! There is a threat to every fat person in America.  The threat is not healthcare you don’t have to pay for (except you do, through your taxes), it’s the control the U.S. Government would have to deny you healthcare at all! Some people have scoffed at that and told me “Allen, it’s like that now! I can’t get approved for this or for that already!” And sadly, for some people, that is absolutely true.

But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! This bill opens the door for the Government to have unlimited control of healthcare, which can literally mean they control your quality of life! And by tying it to insurance and ultimately, wrestling management from the private sector, all kinds of scenarios become possible:

1. Want a job? Get weight loss surgery. Hey, the government will pay for it!

2. Need lifesaving cancer treatment? Your BMI is too high, raising your risk factor. Coverage denied.

3. Need some credit to buy a house, buy a bed, medical equipment, a car? Will that be gastric bypass or lapband?

Shall I go on? There is a genuine threat building. And the only answer is to unite and fight for the term “size (weight and height)” to be added to Federal anti-discrimination laws before the drastic healthcare initiatives become the law of the land.

Do we need to have “hospices for fat people” and mandatory weight loss surgery before people will have had enough? The proposed legislation has proven to me that the people who drafted the legislation do not have human life as the priority, only the bottom line.

Seriously…what will it take?

Sound The Size Acceptance Alarm

Here in the United States, we just celebrated Independence Day, the 4^th of July. And yet, we are in uncertain times – financially, politically and most of all, in terms of our civil liberties. There is a growing feeling in America that our liberties are expendable in the pursuit of solutions to problems like the economic crisis and providing health care just as they were (and are) concerning the war on terror.

But something’s changed. Whereas past administrations were content to keep the status quo on health care and just create bloated budgets to pay for pet projects for lobbyists, we now have a government that seizes businesses and appoints czars that are not elected and are only accountable to the government that created them.

What I have just written is not new. It has been voiced by others…independents, conservatives, libertarians and others.

So what does any of this have to do with size acceptance, you might ask?

What if our government decides to create a Weight Loss Czar? Oh, they’d probably make the title sound less overbearing, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Or if/when they create socialized medicine, what if people who are above a certain BMI aren’t allowed certain treatments unless they lose weight? If you think it can’t happen, ask someone who lives in the United Kingdom or elsewhere. They’ll set you straight on that, and quickly.

[07-31-09 Update: Please stop sending comments like "Life is so great under NHS here in the UK, what's wrong with you Americans?" I have already stated this is not an "us vs. them" blog entry. I'm no longer accepting those comments, so don't try.

Please read the entire entry! This is about alerting people of all sizes to what is going on and being planned for the UNITED STATES and making preparations for those matters in advance. If you're happy with what you're getting in the UK, that's great!]

Right now, fat people are mostly not protected under U.S. law, and as a result, we know the discrimination that happens every day. As bad as that is, it could get infinitely worse in the very near future.

We need to wake up, and we need to re-claim our voice. We need to get laws passed that add “size (weight and height)” to the current protections. It will take a lot of effort and it won’t happen immediately, so we need to get started.

And if you don’t live in the U.S., don’t think you’re excluded. What happens in the U.S. tends to find its way to other parts of the world, sometimes very quickly…

Some people will accuse me of being alarmist. Some people will say I’m being judgmental of a new President, that I’m one of those bitter, conservative Republicans who won’t find anything right with President Obama.

To that, I answer: I’m not a Republican (or a Democrat), and I voted for President Obama.

But the change he has unleashed is not what I was led to believe it would be — and the same could well be true of health care. This has the potential to lead to many deaths through malpractice/incompetence and denial of service. If so, it would be based on fear and an inherent prejudice that exists in the current medical establishment, fear and discrimination taught in medical school. Where “Do No Harm” takes a back seat to “do whatever we can to get rid of fat and line our pockets at the same time.”

And in fairness, not all doctors feel like that. But doctors have to follow the rules, and the rules could change…radically. And that’s what concerns me, and I think it concerns many doctors as well.

So call me alarmist, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. We’re in uncertain times, and it’s time to get ready.

This whole blog entry is about a “call to arms” to be prepared. There are some warning signs in what President Obama has already said concerning “obesity” in his presidential campaign. And should some of those concerns translate into restrictive/harmful anti-obesity rules or even legislation in what appear to be the coming changes to the healthcare system, then we — the so-called Size Acceptance Movement — would do well to have preparations made and plans in place.

The best defense we have is to plan now — a good offense, if you will. If we wait till the changes have been made, we will have lost opportunity to do anything about it. Right now in the U.S., we continue to enjoy the freedom to organize, peacefully dissent and voice our concerns to our elected officials. We need to avail ourselves of these freedoms and work to change the anti-discrimination laws to include “size (weight and height).” That is one step. The other step is to communicate with our representative officials concerning existing discrimination problems in healthcare.

I have spent the last 12 years working and fighting, alongside many brave and wonderful people of all sizes and all political, religious and sexual persuasions. We have fought and continue to fight the common foes of ignorance and those who would profit from others’ ignorance or fear to act.

This is not some lame “I hate socialized medicine and all countries that practice it suck” blog entry. This is me, Allen Steadham, the Founder and Director of ISAA, and based upon my experience and what I see happening on multiple fronts, I see cause for concern.

I hope I have made things clear. I will write more in the weeks and months to come. Thanks.